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Re: Shirttail cousins -- blogging's bertter

Cross-posted to 3 groups.

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On Friday or thereabouts, Steve Hayes asked ...
> About 40 years ago an American relative used a term, "shirt-tail
> cousin", that was unfamiliar to me. I did not know her well, and was
> too shy to ask what she meant by it in case she took offence. Last
> year I asked about it on an English usage forum, and mentioned that
> she came from El Paso, Illinois, and later lived in New Orleans, to
> give a clue to her dialect area, in case anyone knew about such
> things. This request was treated with a great deal of rudeness by a
> supercilious American, who accused me of inventing a place with a
> Spanish name in Illinois, but had no reliable information on the
> meaning of the term. 
>
> So yesterday I blogged about it. Since it was Christmas day, it also
> seemed a suitable opportunity to post a picture of the cousin I
> referred to, taken on Christmas day in 1981, and the blog post is
> here. 
>
> https://t.co/pwAnayyTnF
>
> And this brought the answer to my question. The English usage forum
> just produced a great deal of acrimonious discussion with no useful
> information. The blog post prompted a cousin to find the answer to my
> question here:
>
> http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-shi5.htm
>
> Shirttail relative
>
> "Q From Charles F Weishar: I attempted to find the source of shirttail
> relative and similar expressions in Hendrickson’s encyclopedia and
> your site but have found nothing. I hear the phrase used to describe a
> person who is close but not actually related by blood.
>
> A That’s roughly the meaning given in the dictionaries. It’s usually
> said to refer to somebody who is a relative by marriage or is only
> distantly related, such as a fourth cousin, or is a family friend with
> honorary status as a relative. It’s fairly common in the USA and has
> been since the 1950s or thereabouts.
>
> Getting to the bottom of it, so to speak, may be a task beyond my
> abilities from this side of the Atlantic Ocean. One dictionary of
> American slang suggests it was originally southern and mid-western US
> dialect. The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) has
> examples from 1927 onwards, such as shirt-tail kin and shirt tail
> cousin, as well as your form."
>
> I have a Facebook friend whom I describe as my "step fourth
> cousin-in-law once removed" (her stepfather was my wife's fourth
> cousin once removed). I think I can now refer to her as a "shirttail
> cousin" for short. 
>
> Maybe my mistake was Googling for "shirt-tail cousin" with a hyphen
> instead of "shirttail relative", but at any rate, the blog post
> produced the information I was looking for, whereas a query in the
> appropriate newsgroup didn't, so I conclude that blogging's better. 

I remember the mythicalism of location being discussed with some heat, 
but evidently I didn't catch the original question.  I'd have been 
happy to give my usage (which overlaps what you reported today), but I 
certainly would not have been able to give much documentation on its 
proper usage or range of appearance.

So blogging is better.  May the joy of Christmas extend past the 25th 
of December.

/dps

-- 
"That's a good sort of hectic, innit?"

" Very much so, and I'd recommend the haggis wontons."
                -njm

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